‘A former Court of Appeal judge has stoked the debate about judicial independence by suggesting that rules preventing judges from speaking about their role fuel media and public distrust of the criminal justice system.’

‘Baroness Hale of Richmond will succeed Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury as President of the UK Supreme Court, it was announced today, alongside three additional appointments to the UK’s top appeal court.’

‘Two things are on a collision course. The first is Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service’s (HMTCS) plan that courts operate on a shift system – so called “Flexible Operating Hours”.The second is the determination of the legal profession and many within the judiciary to do whatever it takes to retain talented women at the Bar so that the senior Bar and the judiciary at all levels exhibit a stronger representation of women.’

‘I have taken as the first part of the title of this lecture words with which Lord Scarman would have been very familiar: Law Reform Now – the three words which formed the title of the Gerald Gardiner and Andrew Martin book which contained their blueprint for what would become the Law Commission. As Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC, in the course of tracing the origins and huge success of the Law Commission in his 2015 Scarman Lecture, recalled, it started with a proposition; one they took to be axiomatic: “. . . that much of our English law is out of date, and some of it shockingly so.” They were not wrong.’

‘Jennifer Youngs and Vondez Phipps, pupil barristers at 42 Bedford Row, summarise the circumstances in which judicial conduct at a case management hearing might form the basis of an application for recusal, and provide guidance to practitioners as to the manner in which such an application might be made.’

‘David Lidington MP today [19 June] told the most senior legal figures in England and Wales that he will be ‘resolute and unflinching’ as lord chancellor in upholding the rule of law and defending the independence of the judiciary.’

‘Supreme Court judges should question the make-up of all-male teams of barristers appearing before the highest court in the land as their prevalence is damaging diversity in the profession, researchers have argued.’

‘Twenty one new deputy High Court judges were appointed yesterday, of whom a third were women – among them a senior government solicitor, the vice-chair of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) and an academic.’

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